Dan Rather’s upcoming biopic risks whitewashing his 2004 Bush National Guard scandal—where he retracted forged documents amid $1M in CBS payouts—while Hollywood rewrites history, from Argo’s sanitized CIA to Disney’s shelved Path to 9/11 and mob-linked Kennedy docudrama. The Nobel Prize’s leftist slant ignores Tom Wolfe while elevating Alexievich, mirroring Star Trek’s shift from liberalism to primitivism and Avatar’s romanticized tribalism. Even soul music radio faced censorship when a black activist silenced Ella Fitzgerald for Louis Armstrong’s "unacceptable" legacy, proving culture wars erase truth—just like Rather’s film likely will. [Automatically generated summary]
Hollywood is making a movie about CBS newsman Dan Rather.
I can't wait.
I got my sleeping bag for the ticket line, got my bucket of popcorn, got my Dan Rather t-shirt and merchandise.
I can't remember the last time I was this excited without actually being inside the Department of Motor Vehicles.
The movie is about that time Rather got so desperate to lay a journalistic glove on a thoroughly uncorrupt and honest President George W. Bush that he reached back to an incident that occurred when the then nearly 60-year-old Bush was in his 20s and allegedly did something, something, something.
Using his super-duper secret journalistic techniques, Rather managed to secure some completely fraudulent Bush-damning documents that were so skillfully manufactured they were exposed as fake 15 minutes later by a 10-year-old girl using my little iPad.
Rather, as you'll remember, at first insisted that no, the documents were real.
Then he was forced to admit the documents were fake, but insisted the story he had made up was real.
Then he was forced to resign in disgrace and humiliation, although he was heralded as a great and honest newscaster by Brian Williams, who remembered how they had fought side by side in the Battle of Isengard.
Rather then sued CBS, but his suit was thrown out of court by a judge who wrote in his decision, quote, unquote.
Today, an elder statesman of 83, Rather has moved beyond the incident and found inner peace in his role as a bitter, querulous old man who keeps insisting that the fake story was real.
So you might ask, what's the movie going to be about?
Well, of course, it's a screwy Judd Appatau comedy with Seth Rogan playing the gormless Rather as he stumbles from mishap to mishap, following what he thinks is a nose for news, but turns out in a hilarious reversal to be a left-wing bias so slanted he ultimately slides down the slope of it into a big smelly pile of his own dishonesty.
Nah, I made that up.
In fact, Robert Redford, also known as the Sundance Old Man, will portray the misguided pseudo-journ with Kate Blanchette playing his partner and bias Mary Mapes in what the Hollywood Reporter describes as, quote, a narrative that depicts them as courageous reporters betrayed by a corporation that cared more about its standing in Washington than protecting its journalists.
Thus, the movie is called truth, because they had to get truth in there somewhere, and the title was the only place it would fit.
But really, truth will be part of a long Hollywood tradition, lying.
Or, to put it more exactly, rewriting conservative reality into left-wing fantasy, which come to think of it as exactly what Rather did.
So Hollywood may be just the right place for his story to be told.
Dishonest leftists telling dishonest leftist stories about dishonest leftists telling dishonest leftist stories and an infinite regress of dishonest leftism.
As they used to say at CBS, that's the way it is.
Or isn't, but we say it is.
Like, whatever.
Trigger warning.
Hollywood's Liberal Rewrites00:11:30
I'm Andrew Klavan, and this is The Andrew Klavan Show.
It's the last Andrew Klavan Show of this week, and we'll be back on...
Are we here for Columbus Day?
Actual Monday.
We will be here for Columbus Day to celebrate the wiping out of primitive native people in the name of civilization, which I'm completely for an iPhone.
How many people, you know, they once asked the novelist William Faulkner if he had to save an old woman who was drowning or the complete works of Shakespeare, which he would save.
And he said, Shakespeare is worth any number of old ladies.
And I think I feel the same way about those old civilizations.
You know, if you want to hold on to a continent, you have to invent the wheel first.
Did you ever see Apocalypto?
I mean, that shows you what those civilizations were like when the Westerners show up to wipe them out.
like, good idea.
All right, the big cultural news of the day is that the Nobel Prize in Literature went to Svetlana Alexevich, which is great because now I'll have something to read when I'm dead, which is the time I plan to get their novels of Svetlana Alexevich.
You know, they're never going to give it to Tom Wolfe, who's probably the only living novelist who deserves it.
Michelle Willebeck is an interesting French novelist.
People should read him here.
You know, his novels, every one of his novels is about the same thing.
It's about a decadent Frenchman who sleeps with everybody he can get his hands with, hands-on, and then Muslims kill everybody.
So it's not just a metaphor for Europe.
It's like this completely decadent hedonist society being killed by Muslims.
He's not going to win.
Tom Wolf's not going to win.
Oh, hey, there's Jasper.
That's Jasper the Wonder Dog.
The other one is Cormac McCarthy, who, I swear, if Cormac McCarthy is not a stone right-winger, I don't know how to read a novel.
And he never talks about it because I think he wants to win the Nobel Prize.
So I'm hoping he'll win and then get up and give his speech, go, full juice.
Really put it to him.
Anyway, there's only one thing you need to know about the Nobel Prize for Literature, five words.
Leo Tolstoy never won one.
That's it.
Tolstoy never won one.
In fact, he lost to the wonderful writer Christian Mommsen, who I know I'm sure you have a complete Christian Mommsen collection on your shelves.
James Joyce never won.
Mark Twain never won.
Proust Chekhov never won.
It's basically a political prize.
I mean, they give it, this woman, as far as I can tell, believes in freedom, has been writing, she's from Belarus or something.
She's been writing against the tyrants.
I'm not saying she's a bad person.
But, you know, it's like Vaklav Havel and Toni Morrison.
Toni Morrison is a good novelist who happens to be a black woman, so she got the prize for being a black woman, basically.
And that's what it is.
And it's just a political, you know, a political prize.
It's not an artistic prize.
Which brings me back to Dan Rather.
I don't want to beat a dead horse.
What was that old joke?
You're a bestial, sadistic necrophiliac, but that's beating a dead horse.
So old Woody Allen, Woody Allen joke.
But you know, this is something that Hollywood has been doing with absolute fervor for years and years, is rewriting conservative reality and turning it into liberal fantasy.
I mean, the last really big one was Argo, and a lot of conservatives were fooled by Argo.
The Ben Affleck picture won the Oscar.
They were fooled by Argo because it had an all-American hero rescuing hostages from the Iranian Muslims.
And I thought, wow, that's an all-American story.
If you watch Argo closely, the history of that time is completely rewritten.
They make the hostage crisis our fault for our meddling in Iranian politics.
They make Jimmy Carter comes off smelling like a rose.
I mean, Jimmy Carter was a complete weakling and incompetent in that situation.
It went on for days and days and days and only ended when Ronald Reagan took office on the day Ronald Reagan took office and the Ayatollah Khomeini looked at Ronald Reagan and thought, hmm, I think I'm going to release the hostages before I get a missile up my nose, you know.
And I think that, and in the movie, it ends with Jimmy Carter making this statesmanlike speech and all this stuff.
And the left has been doing this repeatedly.
They did it all, all through the war on terror.
What is that?
Sounds like they're grinding Englishmen to make their bread.
All through the War on Terror, they rewrote the War on Terror.
They had Green Zone, remember?
Everybody knew every piece of intelligence we had said there were WMD in Iraq.
But in Green Zone, Matt Damon heroically finds out it was all a Republican conspiracy, Lions for Lambs, Tom Cruise is an evil Republican who has a conspiracy to start a war.
They've been continually, I mean, the biggest one, the biggest one they've done, well, they do it every week on Law and Order.
Every week on Law and Order, something with a right-wing message is turned into a left-wing story.
I remember the biggest one, the one that drove me crazy was Terry Shivo.
Remember Terry Shiva, this brain-damaged woman, and I'm not taking sides on the issue of what should have happened, but they judiciously starve this woman to death while the evangelical Christians are praying, saying, please respect life, respect life.
Law and Order, they rewrite the story.
A Terry Shaivo-like woman is there.
An evangelical Christian is the person who commits murder.
So it's like, just a slight, it's a little change.
I like the idea that there's an evangelical Christian, but instead of being for life, could he kill somebody?
That would be so much more realistic.
That's Hollywood working.
The biggest one of all, of course, is John F. Kennedy.
And this happened from the moment John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
John F. Kennedy was a ferocious, ferocious cold warrior.
And he was killed by a communist.
He was killed by a guy who tried to defect to the Soviets.
I don't think even the Soviets wanted him.
He was concerned about what Kennedy was doing in Cuba, and he killed the president.
He took a rifle and killed the president.
From the minute that happened, the news, the left-wing news media began to rewrite the story.
It happened almost immediately because they could not stomach the fact that a left-winger had killed their idol, Kennedy, because of Kennedy's essentially staunch right-wing position defending the world, defending freedom against the slave state of the Soviet Union.
Immediately, they had hate.
They had stories saying hatred.
Hatred killed JFK.
Hatred killed JFK.
And they would show the anti-JFK posters that went up in Dallas by racists who didn't like the fact that he was liberal about civil rights.
And so they would hatred.
And then it was this big conspiracy, and finally, Oliver Stone made that picture JFK, which also, I think, did that one on Oscar II, I think.
And at least it won Oscars, which had this crazy theory that businessmen and LBJ conspired to kill Kennedy because he was going to disband the CIA and pull our troops out of Vietnam, which was utterly absurd.
And the thing is, they do this so assiduously with so much force.
Not only do they do it to themselves, they stop us from doing it.
My pal Cyrus Nawasta made a great film called The Path to 9-11, which was a massively popular TV movie that showed that Bill Clinton neglected to kill Osama bin Laden when he had a chance several times because he was too occupied with the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
This got huge ratings on TV.
It has still not been released on DVD and it will never be released on DVD as long as Clinton's pals are running Disney, which I guess is the one in ABC Disney, I guess, is the one that has the rights to it.
So that's never been released.
Another pal, Julcerno, made a Kennedy docudrama that was a TV movie.
It was actually pretty flattering to the Kennedys, I thought, but it did show that Joe Kennedy was a mobster.
Kennedy pals knocked it off the popular history channel and sent it spinning into some small cable station where nobody could find it.
And they do this.
There was this one fair game about Valerie Playman, Joseph Wilson.
And Joseph Wilson, you'll remember, wrote this thing saying that there were no WMDs in Iraq and it was all fraud.
And he said that Saddam Hussein hadn't tried to get uranium in Africa, and he had proved this beyond a shadow of doubt, wrote an op-ed for it.
It all turned out to be false.
So the media, rather than saying, oh, Bush was right, what Bush said was true, invented this complete nonsense scandal about exposing Valerie Plame, a minor CIA agent who wasn't even in the field, staged this huge investigation, which Bush walked into like a rat in a trap.
And they got nobody except poor scooter Libby who happened to forget what he had said one day and said something different on another day.
And then they made this picture Fair Game in which, you know, Dick Cheney was basically conspiring against these people to keep the Iraq's conspiracy going and all this stuff.
And Joseph Wilson, when somebody said to him, nobody's going to see this movie, he said, for people who have short memories or don't read, this is the only way they'll remember the period, which was exactly right.
And not only do they do, do they rewrite history, not only does the left rewrite history, but they rewrite great stuff that conservatives make that are popular things, like Star Trek is a perfect example.
There's a really good article about this.
Really, soon, one day soon, we will have the capacity to have guests and interviews and things like that.
On this, I would bring in Bill Whittle, who knows more about Star Trek than any grown-ass man.
I mean, he knows everything there is to know about Star Trek.
But there was a really interesting article about this in the Claremont Review of Books, where the guy talked about the fact that the original Star Trek had what we would call classical liberal values, which would be our values, conservative values.
Classical liberal values are what conservatives basically believe in.
So when some hippies on some strange planet had this absolute Edenic Eden, Kirk would just go down and destroy it so they would be free and not be backward.
Then they started, when Gene Roddenberry, the guy who created Star Trek, died, they started remaking these things and doing the same thing they do to history.
They started rewriting it.
So by the time they made this one Star Trek insurrection, it was all about how the Eden starts out with this beautiful Eden and they say, well, yeah, we have technology, but we don't use it.
And you remember yesterday we were talking about the Martian and we were talking about all these great science fiction pictures, the Martian interstellar Mathis reminded me of gravity was another one where they show people solving problems, having faith in God and being led by faith in God to have faith in themselves.
But this was like they even rewrote Star Trek to make it this primitivism, which of course found its absolute avatar, this primitivism, found this absolute avatar in Avatar, which had the absolute left-wing dream of a primitive society that had all the great things that you get from oil.
Savoy's Jazz Fusion00:06:06
So it had a tree with lights on it and you could fly on dragons.
And I thought like, hey, we can have lights and flying now.
You just need oil.
That's the way you fly and have lights.
So the left has been rewriting history, gutting every good thing that we make into a vision of themselves, of their own regression, their regressiveness and primitivity.
And that's why we'll be back on Monday to celebrate Columbus and civilization.
Hooray, which brings us all back in a full circle.
And now we're going to, I have a rather long stuff I like.
We've been doing Halloween stuff I like, but I like to end the week with music.
So I'm going to play what I think may be my single favorite cut of American popular music in the world, except for maybe 10 other single favorite cuts of popular music.
This is Stompin' at the Savoy with Elephants Gerald and Louis Armstrong.
I believe that these two, the two albums they made, they made three albums, but I believe two of those albums are the greatest popular music that has ever been recorded.
a collaboration between El Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, two voices that should never have gone together.
I was actually fired once for playing Ella Fitzgerald on a radio station.
I was, through a series of unfortunate events, I became the only white DJ on a black soul station.
I was on overnight, so nobody knew I was there, you know, because it was literally like from two in the morning until six in the morning.
And the entire station was black except for me.
I used to say I've got about as much soul as a J.C. Penny saddleshoe, you know, but I would, but I would do my best to play, you know, the music that I loved.
I mean, how many millions or thousands of great African-American musical artists are there?
So I was happy to play black music, but I wasn't always playing soul music, and it was a soul station.
99% of the people at the station and I got along great.
They were nice to me.
It was funny.
It was funny that there was this one white face walking around playing this music and we kid with each other and we had a great time and we were all friends.
One guy was a black activist.
There was one guy in the station who was a black activist.
And if I could build a trapdoor in the floor of reality, I would rig it to open whenever an activist of any sort walked over it.
Like it was a black activist.
He was like, boom, boom, oh my goodness, that's too bad.
You know, like, hi, I'm a gay actor.
Oh, Lord, that's terrible.
You know, feminist, boom.
Because if you only know people through the activists that you see on TV, you would hate everybody.
You would hate black people.
You would hate gay people.
You would hate women.
If that was all you knew, it was activists.
And this guy came down and he heard me, I guess he wandered in one night when I was doing the overnight and he heard me playing Ella Fitzgerald, maybe the greatest American singer, popular singer of all time, maybe, at least one of them.
And he said, why are you playing that?
This is a soul station.
I said, hey, if Ella Fitzgerald doesn't got soul, you know, I don't know who does.
And I made a joke or something about being the token white guy.
And this guy did that black activist thing.
They didn't have the term microaggression then, but he started picking out, that's not a funny joke.
And I, in my usual lovable way, said, you know, let me give you a suggestion.
If you don't think my joke is funny, don't laugh.
And then I made an anatomical suggestion that might have been physically impossible.
I don't know.
So the next day I was called in before the boss and they said, you know, you're playing Ella Fitzgerald on this soul station.
And so I resigned.
So you are looking at a martyr to Ella Fitzgerald.
What you will hear on Stompin' the Savoy, it was 1957.
They brought these two guys in, two of the greatest American popular musicians ever, El Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, and they let them rip.
They just let them jam.
And this is the rehearsal.
And you can hear, it starts out with Ella singing, and the minute she opens her mouth, you will hear a bell-like voice that simply does not exist anywhere else on this plane of existence.
And then she starts to scat, and she was the greatest scat singer ever.
I mean, it was just one of the great scat singers.
And then you hear Louis Armstrong.
And Louis Armstrong, we were talking about this with comedians, this thing happens in American culture where people get denatured, you know, they get vanillaized.
And a lot of people remember Louis Armstrong from his Hello Dolly days, you know, Hello Dolly and all this stuff.
He would stand on stage and nobody loved him and all this.
Louis Armstrong and Bing Crosby, single-handedly almost, invented American music.
And Bing Crosby went on to become the same thing, boo-boo-boo-boo and white Christmas and all this stuff.
Bing Crosby, when he started out, was one of the most inventive jazz singers ever.
And these two guys brought black and white influences together and they kind of invented American music.
When Armstrong starts the play, you will hear an unmistakable trumpet with all the extra notes cut out.
One of the things he did was trumpet playing used to be this kind of acrobatic thing where you'd hear the riffs going, the rapid fire fingers.
He just cut all that out, as few notes as possible.
And finally, after you hear all this great stuff, the two of them start jamming together.
And you can just hear they're making stuff up and they haven't got it and they keep, you know, going off down dead ends that don't work.
It's still one of the greatest songs ever, one of the greatest recordings ever.
So, ending this day and leading into wonderful Columbus Day where we celebrate the destruction of the Native American peoples, here is Stompin' at the Savoy with Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong from 1957.